Lot 282: Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918)

Femme assisse signed 'Duchamp Villon' (on the top of the base); inscribed with foundry mark 'George Rudier Fondeur Paris Louis Carr‚ Editeur Paris' (on the side of the base) bronze with black patina Height: 253/4 in. (65.5 cm.) Conceived in 1914; this bronze version cast in the 1950s PROVENANCE Galerie Louis Carr‚, Paris. LITERATURE P. Francastel, ed., "Duchamp-Villon," Les Sculptures C‚lŠbres, Paris, 1954, p. 307. G.H. Hamilton, and W.C. Agee, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, New York, 1967, pp. 83-84, no. 23 (another cast illustrated, p. 21, fig. 6; detail of another cast illustrated, p. 82, fig. 58). R. Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art, New York, 1976, p. 293 (another cast illustrated, fig. 193). A.M. Hammacher, Modern Sculpture: Tradition and Innovation, New York, 1988, p. 112, no. 125 (another cast illustrated, p. 114). NOTES In 1911 Duchamp-Villon was on the hanging committee for the Salon d'Automne, and he proved instrumental in persuading the hostile jury to include works of the young artists who had been labeled "Cubist." Later that year in his family home in the Paris suburb of Puteaux, he and his brothers Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Villon hosted weekly meetings of artists who were interested in Cubism. Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes (see lots 285 and 287), who were emerging as the leading theorists of the movement, were regular participants; Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, Robert de la Fresnaye, Juan Gris, Fernand L‚ger and Alexander Archipenko attended as well. Following the succŠs de scandale of the Cubist Salle 41 at the 1912 Salon des Ind‚pendants, Villon suggested that the Puteaux group hold their own exhibition outside of the spring and fall salons. Calling themselves the Section d'Or, their exhibition at the Galerie de la Bo‚tie in October 1912 marked the culmination of the Cubist movement, after which these artists took separate paths in their stylistic evolution. Duchamp-Villon and his brothers participated in the design of the Maison cubiste, the first floor of whose fa‡ade was erected at the 1912 Salon d'Automne. Despite his immersion in the pre-war Cubist milieu, however, Duchamp-Villon's sculpture owes little to the Cubist painting of his contemporaries. Like his brother Marcel, he was too individualistic and independent. He was self-taught as a sculptor, and early in his career he assimilated the influence of Rodin, Gauguin, Maillol and Matisse. He developed a taste for a classically clear and balanced form. The complex planar facture of Cubist painting was largely alien to his outlook. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that simplicity, even austerity, are the indispensable virtues and that our ideas of the beautiful should be clothed in them" (quoted in A.E. Elsen, Origins of Modern Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises, New York, 1974, p. 34). Femme assise is Duchamp-Villon's first free-standing sculpture following the architectural designs and reliefs related to the Maison cubiste. It appears to have been derived from the jointed wooden mannequin used by painters and sculptors as a basic guide to the forms and rhythms of the body. "The sections of the mannequin undoubtedly assisted Duchamp-Villon in making the difficult transition from relief to three dimensions, first in arranging the pose, and second in eliminating the need to 'compose' or 'design' the figure, thereby enabling him to concentrate solely on the assembling of the formal elements" (W.C. Agee, op. cit, p. 83). The sculptor creates an equilibrium between movement and repose. Although the figure is convincingly volumetric, there is little interest in analyzing form or structure in its parts - the emphasis is instead on the effect made by the whole. With his preference for ovoid and rounded shapes, in which most angular shapes have been smoothed over and all surface detail eliminated, Duchamp-Villon looks past Cubism to a streamlined machine aesthetic. Such mechanical elements are also observable in the paintings of Marcel Duchamp, Picabia, L‚ger and de Chirico during this period, and prefigure the tendency towards the cool, mechanical classicism of the period following the First World War. Duchamp-Villon's career was relatively brief. The outbreak of the war in August 1914 caught him in the midst of his work on his last and most dynamic series of sculptures, based on the subject of the horse. He had been a medical student in his youth, and he enlisted in the army medical corps shortly after the war began. He continued to work on Le Cheval during his leaves. He contracted typhus on the front in late 1916, and after months in the hospital, his strength slowly ebbing, he died in October 1918, a month before the armistice was signed.